Sermons

The Bible readings for today give us a compelling vision for what we could be:

• the Jewish prophet tells us that the Holy One is, ultimately, about compassion, warmth, and tenderness, and brings the people of Israel home, regardless to their sins.
• Jesus says that material prosperity and success are not the purpose of existence.
• Paul calls us to a new humanity where the old divisions fall away.

We long to be that new humanity. Yet we all know how fleeting are the moments when we experience oneness with others.So what blocks us from being that which we long to be?

Good Morning.  It’s the middle of summer, lots of us on vacation, so this sermon is taking advantage of the summer mood—it will be a little off beat.

How many of you remember the night 50 years ago when Armstrong walked on the moon?  Do you remember the mood of the country?  Anything was possible.  The future would be so wonderful and different.  I went to Disney World 30 years ago, and I still remember the futuristic scenes of flying space cars and people movers everywhere.    Now, when you use your imagination, what do you think the world will be like 50 years from now?  What about 100 years from now?  I have put index cards on the seats—if you have a pen, take one minute to write down your initial impression—just key adjectives or main ideas you think of.  I will give you one minute.

We seem to be living through some pretty tough times. The ever-deepening drama downtown is raising the volume of fear and anger at many levels. From the interpersonal to the international, we’re learning to expect disrespect. It hurts!

Anne Lamott reminds us in our reflection for this season that “hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.” It feels to me like we’re in a dark night of the soul. Some days it’s a real challenge to “wait and watch and work” in the dark. And living with 100-degree days doesn’t help!

At the outset I want to mention several sources that helped open up this familiar gospel story for me. One is The Jewish Annotated New Testament, second edition, co-edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler,[i] using their notes and an essay in it, “The Concept of Neighbor in Jewish and Christian Ethics,” by Michael Fagenblat.[ii] The second is Through Peasant Eyes[iii] by Kenneth E. Bailey, a renowned scholar of Middle East cultures, entitled “The Good Samaritan.” And, of course I did peek at the article “Samaritans” in Wikipedia!

The gospels of Matthew and Mark contain short passages in which an expert in the Torah, the text of the Five Books of Moses (Genesis through Deuteronomy) and the rabbinical interpretation and commentary on it, asks Jesus which commandment in the Torah is the greatest. Jesus responds, “Love the Most High God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and strength. That’s the first and greatest commandment and the second is like it, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The brevity of the anecdotes has led many Christians to believe — erroneously — that Jesus issued a new commandment.

Naaman is such an interesting character! Here he is, this great man, a commander of armies under the King of Aram, but he had leprosy. Leprosy was a deadly progressive disease; it was contagious and there was significant risk that those who cared for him, like servants or family members, would get it too. It must have been devastating for a man like Naaman to have an incurable disease. He was used to giving orders and having everyone obey him without question, and yet he was unable to make his sickness go away. And this story might have ended here, with Naaman slowly dying a disfiguring horrible death and taking those he loved with him, except for a young girl from the land of Israel, a captive from one of the raids Aram had conducted against the Israelites.

So I want you to imagine the life of this girl. We don’t know her name, indicating that she was very unimportant in the scheme of things. She probably came from a small village close to the border with Aram. She might have been helping her mother do the chores, or taking care of her siblings, or going for water, or feeding the chickens, when these fearsome soldiers came to her village and grabbed her and others in the village and took them away. Away from everything she had ever known. We don’t know what happened immediately after she arrived in Aram, but we know that eventually she ended up serving Naaman’s wife, forced to work for someone she didn’t know and who had taken her from all she knew and loved. She was definitely “a lamb among the wolves.”